Vishaan Chakrabarti Lecture: A Country of Cities

Vishaan Chakrabarti is Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the director of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Simultaneously, he is a principal of SHoP Architects, where with his six partners he leads the growing firm's large-scale metropolitan project portfolio. Chakrabarti formerly served as director of New York City planning department's Manhattan office in the years after the September 11 attacks. Prior to this post, he was an associate partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

A licensed architect, Chakrabarti received dual bachelor degrees from Cornell University in art history and engineering. He also holds a master of architecture from the University of California–Berkeley and a master of city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"A Country of Cities" is the title of Chakrabarti’s forthcoming book, which is expected in the spring 2013 from Metropolis/DAP Books. The book is “A Manifesto for an Urban America,” in which a future of trains, towers, and trees is envisioned as a prosperous, sustainable, and equitable alternative to our current failing condition of highways, houses, and hedges. The lecture presents material that is a combination of research conducted for the book and other provocations on dense development that Chakrabarti and his students have recently undertaken in groundbreaking new design and development studios at Columbia University.

Sponsored by the Department of City and Regional Planning, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning